Removing the Trailing Slash in Magento
-
Hi guys,
We have noticed trailing slash vs non-trailing slash duplication on one of our sites.
Example:
Duplicate: https://www.example.com.au/living/
Preferred: https://www.example.com.au/livingSo, SEO-wise, we suggested placing a canonical tag on all trailing slash pointing to non-trailing slash.
However, devs have advised against removing the trailing slash from some URLs with a blanket rule, as this may break functionality in Magento that depends on the trailing slash. The full site would need to be tested after implementing a blanket rewrite rule.
Is any other way to address this trailing slash duplication issue without breaking anything in Magento?
Keen to hear from you guys.
Cheers,
-
You could always force trailing slashes instead of removing all trailing slashes.
What you really want to establish, is which structure has been linked to more often (internally and externally). A 301 redirect, even a deeper more complex rule - is seldom the answer in isolation. What are you going to do (for example) when you implement this, then you realise most of the internal links use the opposite structure to the one which you picked, and then all your internal redirects get pushed through 301s and your page-speed scores go down?
What you have to do is crawl the site now, in advance - and work out the internal structure. Spend a lot of time on it, days if you have to, get to grips with the nuts and bolts of it. Figure out which structure most internal/external links utilise and then support it
Likely you will need a more complex rule than 'force all' or 'strip all' trailing slashes. It may be the case that most pages contain child URLs or sub-pages, so you decide to force the railing slash (as traditionally that denotes further layers underneath). But then you'll realise you have embedded images in some pages with URLs ending in ".jpg" or ".png". With those, they're files (hence the file extension at the end of the URL) so with those you'd usually want to strip the slash instead of forcing it
At that point you'd have to write something that said, force trailing slash unless the URL ends with a file extension, in which case always remove the slash (or similar)
Picking the right structural format for any site usually takes a while and involves quite a bit of research. It's a variable answer, depending upon the build of the site in question - and how it has been linked to externally, from across the web
I certainly think, that too many people use the canonical tag as a 'cop out' for not creating a unified, strong, powerful on-site architecture. I would say do stick with the 301s and consolidate your site architecture, but do some crawling and backlink audits - really do it properly, instead of just taking someone's 'one-liner' answer online. Here at Moz Q&A, there are a lot of people who really know their stuff! But there's no substitute for your own research and data
If you're aiming for a specific architecture and have been told it could break the site, ask why. Try and get exceptions worked into your recommendations which flip the opposite way - i.e: "always strip the trailing slash, except in X situation where it would break the site. In X situation always force the trailing slash instead"
Your ultimate aim is to make each page accessible from just one URL (except where parameters come into play, that's another kettle of fish to be handled separately). You don't have to have EVERYTHING on the site one way or the other in 'absolute' terms. If some URLs have to force trailing slash whilst others remove it, fine. The point is to get them all locked down to one accessible format, but you can have varied controlled architectures inside of one website
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How bad is a trailing slash?
I am working in Magento 2 which has all sorts of difficulties. My product page is example.com/testproduct the canonical is the same. But in the sitemap it is example.com/testproduct/ In a perfect world I would get rid of the trailing slash but can't because of this issue- https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/205337/unique-constraint-violation-found-when-remove-suffix-html-magento-2-2-0 The trailing slash will 301 redirect properly. Is it an issue having the sitemap urls different with the trailing slash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
How to remove skip links, main navigation, sidebars as h2 tags in wordpress genesis
Our website CMS is wordpress. Due to the Genesis Framework; below 4 phrases tuned into h2 tags: Skip links, Header Right, Main navigation and Footer. How to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Magento products and eBay - duplicate content risk?
Hi, We are selling about 1000 sticker products in our online store and would like to expand a large part of our products lineup to eBay as well. There are pretty good modules for this as I've heard. I'm just wondering if there will be duplicate content problems if I sync the products between Magento and eBay and they get uploaded to eBay with identical titles, descriptions and images? What's the workaround in this case? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
E Commerce site - removing discontinued items
We have been hit with a Panda penalty and the site has slowly been losing rankings since January, I've now realised that we have 4000+ page indexed in Google, but only 2000 live products. We have never deleted any of the pages with discontinued items, most of which were created when keyword stuffing and thin content reigned supreme - which explains the Panda penalty. But which is the best and quickest way to delete them from Google? We have already implemented a 'noindex' across all these pages, but as they are no longer in the 'crawlable' site, how will Google find them to know this? Would a 404 work any better - I'm not concerned about any link juice etc to/from these pages, I just want rid. I'm not sure if we can move all these pages into a dedicated directory which would allow us to use Google's Removal Tool - using it with the individual urls would be a mammoth task. Any advice would be most greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ElaineAllkids0 -
Add noindex,nofollow prior to removing pages resulting in 404's
We're working with another site that unfortunately due to how their website has been programmed creates a bit of a mess. Whenever an employee removes a page from their site through their homegrown 'content management system', rather than 301'ing to another location on their site, the page is deleted and results in a 404. The interim question until they implement a better solution in managing their website is: Should they first add noindex,nofollow to the pages that are scheduled to be removed. Then once they are removed, they become 404's? Of note, it is possible that some of these pages will be used again in the future, and I would imagine they could submit them to Google through Webmaster Tools and adding the pages to their sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Removing Duplicate Page Content
Since joining SEOMOZ four weeks ago I've been busy tweaking our site, a magento eCommerce store, and have successfully removed a significant portion of the errors. Now I need to remove/hide duplicate pages from the search engines and I'm wondering what is the best way to attack this? Can I solve this in one central location, or do I need to do something in the Google & Bing webmaster tools? Here is a list of duplicate content http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&mode=list&order=name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire
http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=asc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=grid&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&mode=list&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?dir=desc&order=name http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=grid http://www.unitedbmwonline.com/?mode=list Thanks in advance, Steve0